The beginning of the recorded history of the northern Frederick County is intently tied to rivalry between England and France. When the primary Europeans settled in the Emmitsburg area, within the early eighteenth century, the English government was casting a apprehensive eye at French strikes to claim the inside of the American continent. France's holdings there threatened to limit English affect to the coastal strip east of the Allegheny mountains, and, thereby, prevent English dominance of northern America.
To counter French encroachment, the English government started an lively policy of selling settlement of the wilderness. Settlers were organized into groups of a whole lot. The primary settlers, in the space underneath energetic research by the Greater Emmitsburg Space Historical Society, had been collectively known as the Tom's Creek Hundred. Their settlement encompassed land from simply north of present day Thurmont to the outdated Pennsylvania border, from the Monocacy to the Catoctin Mountains.
The Tom Indians, who occupied the Emmitsburg area, had by this time both moved westward or died from European diseases resembling small pox. In consequence, the land occupied by the Tom's Creek Hundred was practically devoid of Indians and, subsequently, ripe for settlement by the English.
Whereas the Royal government opened the land to all settlers for a nominal price, it favored a few choose aristocrats by providing them giant tracts of land in reward for their help of the Crown. One of many earliest land barons in the valley was John Diggs.
Diggs, a grandson of the Royal Governor of Virginia, was a rich Catholic who played a dominant position within the sometimes-bloody border dispute between the Maryland and Pennsylvania governments. With ownership of the Chesapeake and the mouth of the Susquehanna, Maryland pressed its declare of what's now middle Pennsylvania. This remained a dispute that was not settled until the Mason-Dixon line was laid out.
Diggs believed his proper to land, primarily based upon his aristocratic standing, entitled him to most of northern and western Maryland. In 1732, Diggs formally claimed, though without any authority, all of the vacant land on the Monocacy and its many branches, which included all of current day Emmitsburg. In July 1743, Diggs managed to obtain title to three tracts of land in the Emmitsburg area. Diggs' land grabbing was rapidly mimicked by others, albeit in a smaller vogue.
Unfortunately for the land speculators and the settlers, the race between the French and English for the interior of the continent soon acquired out of hand. In 1754, the English were not only preventing the raise alert French, however their Indian allies as effectively. Whereas little preventing occurred in the Emmitsburg space, Indian raiding parties periodically moved by means of the world. Because of this, many settlers withdrew to the relative security of coastal cities.
With the end of the Seven Years Struggle in Europe, during which France ceded sovereignty of the interior of North America to the English, settlers once again forged their eyes toward the wilderness. Some fled from severe religious persecution, others from the oppression of civil tyranny, and still others were attracted by the hopes of liberty under the milder influence of English colonial rule. However for the best half, the settlers flocked to the American continent within the hopes of abandoning the crushing poverty of their homeland and for the prospect to own land and prosper by way of their